I can't decide what to think about this pricing. Would a company pay $6k a year to almost not worry about hosting / ops? Actually, yeah, probably. Still seems like it's missing a lower tier though.
"What about a free option? We've always offered free hosting to every Meteor developer through our meteor deploy feature. It's never going away. Now that we've had a chance to shake out key parts of Galaxy's technology stack with large production apps, we're ready to transition that free meteor deploy service to Galaxy. We've already started on that work, so that every developer can use Galaxy free of charge for simple apps, or purchase smaller plans for projects that aren't a fit for a full commercial plan."
The difference is, Meteor won't have the volume of Digital Ocean or AWS, so they can't run on low margins. They need a high-margin pricing model in order to survive. The danger here is that high-margin pricing provides a high incentive for the largest customers to move to AWS, so they'll have to be sure to provide enough value to keep the big folks.
I think the difference in number of users is partly due to the asking price. I wouldn't use DO if they charged 50$ a month for a VPS to use for mocking up apps. For my use case, 5$-10$ a month is the most I want to pay in such early stages of development.
500$ a month is cheap when you have revenues. But when bootstrapping an app, it's simply out of the question.
Yeah, I'm so used to the pricing tiers used by Digital Ocean, Amazon, and Google Apps that I'm looking at this and going "Wait, the $995 a month tier isn't for enterprise?"
Everyone else is almost in a sort of pricing war, so it really feels very much against the current.
FTA: "every developer can use Galaxy free of charge for simple apps, or purchase smaller plans for projects that aren't a fit for a full commercial plan"
So yeah, little specs plans are coming too.